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In February 2018, President Donald Trump spawned yet another political controversy when he said that he would have intervened to stop a recent mass school shooting if had he been present at the scene, as rhe New York Times reported: President Trump's remarks prompted a wave of scoffing from critics who scornfully pointed out that he had obtained a series of student and medical deferments that kept him out of the military during the Vietnam War era. But Trump's supporters backed him up by pointing to newspaper accounts from 1991 reporting that he had once confronted a baseball-bat-wielding mugger on the streets of New York City: Many readers reacted with skepticism to this information, disbelieving it because it seemed conveniently and suspiciously new to them after the contentious 2016 presidential campaign in which Trump's actions over the course of his life came under scrutiny. However, a Google Trends graph that illustrates search data demonstrated spikes of interest in the story over the previous two years: The original New York< Daily News report of the incident carried a dateline of 20 November 1991 and was syndicated to a number of regional newspapers: The text of the article described Trump, en route to a Paula Abdul concert in November 1991, ordering his limo driver to pull over when he spotted a man wielding a bat attacking another man on the streets of Manhattan: Determining how much of this account is true nearly three decades later is difficult, especially given Trump's long history of self-aggrandizing statements (including his making self-publicizing phone calls to reporters while pretending to be someone else). But unless one were to believe that the Daily News was completely deceived or complicit in running an entirely fabricated story, replete with witness statements, this report would seem to have had some real-life incident behind it. However, the public record of the incident all stemmed from a single report, and even that account was contradictory about exactly what took place. One named witness asserted that the would-be mugger had already run off by the time Trump exited his limo, and the billionaire did nothing more than join a crowd of onlookers after the fact. Another anonymous witness supported Trump's account, maintaining that the bat-wielder had apparently dropped his weapon in response to the billionaire's verbally confronting him. Local police said they could provide no information about what transpired, as the incident wasn't reported to them: The article also noted that this account followed a high-profile mugging of Donald Trump's mother that had taken place a month earlier.
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